Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.

The water in the fountain is running down into a bowl. Not the most practical way to present driking water to humans.

Instead, these fountains were located right next to the street so they could provide drinking water to horses. Carriage horses and wagon horses needed to be able to eat and drink during the work day just like their human caretakers. Feed bags covered the food part and these fountains took care of the water requirement.

Students of Japanese art and culture will recognize the Tuttle Company as the springboard of the illustrious Charles E. Tuttle publishing house, now Tuttle Books. An excerpt from Tuttle's obituary in 1993 outlined his roots: "Tuttle was born in Rutland, Vermont, in 1915, attended local schools in Rutland, Exeter Academy for two years, and then Harvard, majoring in American history and literature. He was the sixth generation of the Tuttle family born in Rutland, where the first Tuttle company opened for business in 1832. The early Tuttles were in printing, newspapers, bookselling, legal stationery and property. (Richard Tottel, a 16th-century ancestor, printed and published books in London between 1570 and 1590.) Charles's own father was an early publisher of black American literature, and also a noted rare book dealer, and Charles joined the family firm after graduating and working for a year in the library of Columbia University." The full obituary can be found here.

Before the modern convenience of piped in running water, there were town wells, this may be what they did with one of them. There are a few such wells converted to fountains here in the South, such as the Old Well in Chapel Hill.

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo archive featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1960s. (Available as fine-art prints from the Shorpy Archive.) The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.